Research in Teams Project: Chaos, Butterflies, and Entanglement in Flat Space

Project postponed to May 1 - July 31, 2021 due to Covid-19

Research Project:

Holography has emerged as one of the principle tools for understanding quantum gravity over the past two decades. Through the celebrated AdS/CFT correspondence, we have furthered our insights about the quantum nature of gravity and also learnt about quantum field theories. Holography, however, is thought to be valid for general spacetimes and not AdS alone. Some of our previous work has been directed at constructing a hologram for asymptotically flat spacetimes.

In this project, we wish to investigate aspects of entanglement and chaos is the context of flatspace holography. The putative dual theories that we would be interested in are two-dimensional field theories with BMS invariance. We will analytic techniques to address questions related to the spread of entanglement (and hence butterflies!) in these field theories and also address aspects of chaos in the dual gravity which includes interesting questions of chaos in cosmological set-ups.